History’s Crucial Role in the Films ‘All Eyez on Me’ and ‘The Beguiled’

What responsibility to the details of history does a movie have when it’s set on a Southern plantation in the middle of the Civil War? That wasn’t really a question we had planned to aim at Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled.” But her film — which is a remake of Don Siegel’s psychological thriller from 1971 about a house full of Confederate girls and women drawn to a wounded Union soldier, played by Clint Eastwood — makes a small but crucial change: The character of the women’s slave named Hallie, played in the original film by Mae Mercer, is omitted. Coppola has said she didn’t want to get the history wrong. But what does she lose by erasing an aspect of it? Is this is a correction, an omission or an act of artistic cowardice?

Speaking of history and responsibility: We saw the 2Pac movie! “All Eyez on Me” tells the story of Tupac Shakur and how the child of persecuted black revolutionaries became one of the best and most scandal-plagued rappers in history. The movie features some of Shakur’s greatest hits, along with depictions of the biggest hip-hop figures of the early 1990s — including Snoop Dogg, Suge Knight, Biggie Smalls, Afeni Shakur and Faith Evans — and culminates in Shakur’s unsolved murder in 1996. The movie’s not very good. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Because during yet another time when the safety of black men’s lives and bodies seems dubious in certain parts of the country, the sustained belief in the mythology of Tupac, not only as an artist, but as a corporeal figure, seems as vital in death as it was in life.

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Wesley Morris is critic at large for The New York Times and a staff writer for The Times Magazine. Jenna Wortham is a staff writer for the magazine.